Skip to main content

So you want to be a lion?




Predators. I like to watch the Planet Earth series produced by the BBC. The stories, photography, and economical narration by David Attenborough are wonderful.  The music composed by George Fenton is perfect.   Episodes on predators are fascinating. 

So you want to be a lion?  Powerful, fast, feared, easy life, high protein diet - a top predator.  Think again.

One thing  I’ve learned is how careful predators must be with their physical plant, i.e. their bodies.  Any injury befalling them, such as a broken paw, sprained leg, or a gore wound, not only loses them their prey, but ultimately kills them by starvation.  They have no doctors and even no friends among their kind. Each is an independent agent living a risky life and trying to survive until, finally overtaken by age, it dies by weakness or starvation. It is a certainty that many lose senses of smell, vision, hearing, or even develop dental problems - also fatal. No medical plans or nursing homes for these guys. 

Examples. Female lions, for example, live about eleven years, and males about seven years. Leopards live 12-17 years, Cheetahs live 10-12 years, Tigers about 12 years.  (All live longer in captivity.) This indicates these animals need to be in top form to survive. Giraffes, a veggie type, live about 25 years. Elephants live even longer. Gazelle’s and elks, the prey, live about eleven years, also indicating the need for top form. The wildebeest hangs on for twenty years. Just a thorn in the hoof will slow it down just enough for death to overtake. A top predator in Africa, the crocodile, lives over seventy years, but has only an occasional bursts of high metabolism – once they get through their first year or so.   For all, predator and prey alike, the first year is critical – the little ones being easy targets.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please Comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Human Simulation is Possible - by Humans

  Human Simulation: Agent-Based Modeling and the Computational Case for Our Reality   1.       Introduction In the essay, we introduce the notion that humanity could be a deliberate simulation based on an extremely simple single-celled organism, hardly anything more complex than that. This will allow an (apparently) new interpretation of the notion that humanity is simulated, but that there is no master engineer at a massive number of dials and switches, responsible for every twist and turn of our universe and lives. We begin with the notion that the universe exists and operates under its own laws. So, given the Earth [2] , when and where life first began, it was infused with a living agent, self-actualized, reproductive, and with other basic rules for its operations, interactions, and much of what single-celled organisms do today. The idea from this occurred some years back when writing code in ActionScript (formerly Flash), I was able to create...
2 comments
Read more

No Sympathy From Me

Suicide Coming Home Many years ago, a friend hung himself in his basement.  I was a pall-bearer at his funeral. I was shocked I was so asked.  I did this.  I did not understand why a good-looking fellow, intelligent, kindly, and true could do such a thing. He did. I do not.  His family suffered greatly.  Yet he left no issue.   Thankfully. To my mind Country singer Mindy McCready, 37, showed us the very height of personal selfishness by committing suicide.  By giving birth to two offspring, she accepted the responsibility to raise her newborn and six-year old son.  She abrogated it spectacularly.  (As did the father a month ago.)  Though she may have suffered depression for any number of reasons, she has little sympathy from me for leaving behind a legacy that is now lost, is now parent-less, and may drift into problems of their own in the future.    There is shame and heartbreak in all this, but blame should be...
1 comment
Read more

The Calculus of Ideas and Patterns

  Introduction. When dealing with ideas, patterns, intuition, and brainstorming, we need operations or rules not unlike those of arithmetic. The goal is not proof, a finished device, or a fait accompli , but rather a foundation for further investigation and study. In some cases, these operations may yield a proposition, that is, something capable of being proved. In this sense, they form a practical logic of intuition. The article concludes with a few select examples from a variety of venues. Setting. We are working with a given idea, problem, or project, or simply just thinking. Our aim is to discover pathways, patterns, or conceptual connections that may be useful. The following operations describe ways in which ideas and patterns can be generated, transformed, or refined. These also work toward understanding the imagination. Yet, this framework is distinguished from formal logic and proof. We are tempted to call them as “soft logic” because while nothing is proved, reasons...
Post a Comment
Read more